The present study examined elicited written English as a foreign language (EFL) narratives produced by 6th grade Hebrew and Arabic speakers in their 4th year of learning EFL. We examined the use of correct verb morphology and morphosyntactic structures, in relation to supporting L1/EFL skills. Fifty-eight pupils (29 Arabic speakers) participated…

Reading numbers aloud, a central aspect of numerical literacy, is a challenging skill to acquire, but the origins of this difficulty remain poorly understood. To investigate this matter, we examined the performance of 127 third- and fourth-grade children who read aloud, in Hebrew, numbers with 2-5 digits. We found several key observations. First,…

The objective of this study was to evaluate the impact of a multi-component homograph processing intervention complemented by Executive Function (EF) skills on the performance of struggling readers. The researchers focused on measuring improvements in literacy, metalinguistic abilities, cognitive/EF skills acquired during the intervention, and…

Given the rich bound morphology of Spoken Arabic, an attempt was made here to construct a developmental measure corresponding to the mean length utterance (MLU) in English and to morpheme-per-utterance (MPU) in Hebrew. The adaptation to Arabic resulted in a new measurement termed Arabic-MPU, that was experimentally tested on a sample of 98…

This study assessed the effect of adjectives and noun premodifiers on L2 noun phrase comprehension and error types among English Language Learners. We also examined the correlation between L2 noun phrase comprehension and L2 reading comprehension, as well as the contribution of L2 noun phrase comprehension to L2 reading comprehension. One hundred…

Background and aims: Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have been found to exhibit difficulties in "wh"-question production. It is unclear whether these difficulties are pragmatic or syntactic in nature. The current study used a question elicitation task to assess the production of subject and object "wh"-questions…

While it is known that heritage speakers diverge from the homeland baseline, there is still no consensus on the mechanisms triggering this divergence. We investigate the impact of two potential factors shaping adult heritage language (HL) grammars: (1) cross-linguistic influence (CLI), originally proposed for second language acquisition (SLA), and…

The main goal of this tutorial is to promote the study of children with developmental language disorder (DLD) across different languages of the world. The cumulative effect of these efforts is likely to be a set of more compelling and comprehensive theories of language learning difficulties and, possibly, of language acquisition in general.…

Acquisition of oral English verb morphology presents difficulties for bilinguals, learners of EFL and English-speaking monolingual children with specific language impairment. This study aimed to identify challenging English verb inflections among sixth grade speakers of Arabic (N = 85) and Hebrew (N = 86) using an elicited oral narrative task, and…

Paper prepared for a conference on Creole Languages and Education, University of the West Indies, July 24-28, 1972. (DD)

Examines a mixed pattern of subject omission in Hebrew. Longitudinal data is presented from three children whose first and only language is Hebrew. Findings show very early acquisition of the null subject system. (Author/VWL)

The application of linguistic analysis of selected function words to the improvement of Hebrew-as-a-second-language reading skills is examined. Semantically, it is shown that form content analysis can provide a unitary meaning to account for various polysemous contextual meanings of Hebrew prepositions. Syntactically and pragmatically, it is shown…

Reports results of a longitudinal study testing the acquisition of restrictions of the use of pronouns in children, first as 9 year olds and later as 11 year olds. (AM)

This document contains the full texts of six papers that were presented at the Southwest workshop on optimality theory. Papers include the following: "Shuswap Diminutive Reduplication" (Sean Hendricks); "On Multiple Sympathy Candidates in Optimality Theory" (Hidehito Hoshi); "A Perceptually Grounded OT Analysis of…